Tag Archives: predatory publishing

Advancing Authorship Webinar: Avoiding Predatory Publishing

Posted on by

How do we support researchers in identifying trusted journals and publishers for their research?

Join us for a deep dive and thoughtful presentations on ways in which our speakers have found to recognize questionable publishing, as well as useful tips to avoid and handle “predatory” journal solicitation.

Bring your questions about this growing issue to this session as there will be time for attendees to participate in an interactive Q&A discussion.

Date: Thursday, June 8, 2023
Time: 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM, EST
Zoom Webinar: Register now

Speaker Bios:

Monica Berger, MS, MA, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology, CUNY, has published and presented on various topics related to scholarly publishing with a focus on predatory (questionable) publishing. She has two forthcoming publications, a chapter on the role of librarians in mitigating predatory publishing by promoting scholarly information literacy (Routledge) and a scholarly monograph on predatory publishing (Association of Research and College Libraries, Publications in Librarianship series). Berger supports faculty scholarship at her campus by teaching workshops as well as providing consultations. An ardent proponent of open access, she also manages her campus institutional repository, CUNY Academic Works.

Jacob Glass, MD, PhD, Computational Physician Scientist on the Leukemia Service and in the laboratory of Ross Levine and the Center for Epigenetics Research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Glass’s laboratory research involves the study of leukemias with lineage ambiguity, the development of natural language processing systems to aid in clinical research, and the construction of models to integrate wearable data in clinical care.

Kevin Nicholas, MPA, is a data scientist on the Applied Data Science team, which is part of MSK’s Strategy & Innovation Department. Kevin has analyzed, built, and published on various predictive models and dashboards over the last decade, including ones used in production by clinical staff at MSK. He has worked at MSK for 7 years and works remotely from his home in Washington, DC.

John Seguin, MLS, President, Chief Librarian and co-founder of Third Iron, a library technology company based in Minneapolis formed in 2011. Since that time the company’s flagship product, the BrowZine Journal Engagement Service, has been adopted by nearly 1,500 institutions in more than 32 countries. Third Iron’s newest offering, LibKey, externalizes much of the internal power of BrowZine into a suite of API’s and products delivering AI-based intelligent linking technology to all aspects of library services. Third Iron aims to improve the user experience of getting users to authenticated materials quickly and easily regardless of their starting point.

Can I Trust this Publisher? Is this Journal Reputable?

Posted on by

New journal titles continue to appear on the scholarly publishing landscape on a regular basis, and more and more of them are choosing to follow an open access (OA) publishing model. What distinguishes these OA journals is that, unlike “traditional” journals that follow a model where the author transfers their copyrights to the publisher but does not pay a publication fee, OA journals generally charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) and allow the authors to retain their copyrights to the published work.

One of the unintended negative consequences of the “author-pays” OA model has been the introduction of “predatory” publishers into this landscape. Predatory publishers mislead authors into thinking that their journal provides a rigorous peer review and high-quality scholarly publication process, when in fact, the operation is really just a scam to collect author article processing charges that provides little in return in terms of legitimate peer-reviewed journal article publishing author services. Bottom line for authors – there is no benefit or reward to be had by the author for publishing their research in a publication that is not reputable – only negative consequences (i.e., a waste of their valuable scholarly efforts).

It basically comes down to a consumer protection issue, with the Federal Trade Commission even going after some of the biggest offenders and winning a $50 million court judgment in 2019. Beyond getting individually scammed, there are broader societal implications of contributing to this “publication-pollution” – in the words of NYC Ethicist, Arthur Caplan –  as he described in his 2015 article where he discusses why it is so important for the sake of trust in research that everyone do their part to mitigate the threat of predatory publishing.

What can MSK authors do to verify that a journal is reputable?

The MSK Library’s “Support for Authors” LibGuide includes a variety of both subscription and free resources that can be used to investigate the legitimacy of a journal. The “Evaluating Journal Quality” MSK Library class provides training and live demonstrations of many of these resources that can help authors determine if a potential journal publisher is trustworthy.

Authors can also look for guidance using a resource called Think. Check. Submit, a tool even endorsed by the NIH (see NOT-OD-18-011: Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research).

 From their website: About | Think. Check. Submit. (thinkchecksubmit.org)

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library.